For a final treat in our SmArt School semester, we had a visit from Matthew Kalamidas, who is the art director for the Science Fiction Book Club. A couple of weeks previously, Matthew had issued an 'assignment' which consisted of the blurb description of a new SFBC novel, and suggested we come up with a cover treatment.
Adult book covers are a bit out of my normal wheelhouse, but I want to be stretching, so I attempted a number of thumbnail treatments (they are posting here in reverse order to what I drew - I got progressively more symbolic and 'surreal' the longer I went - a direction I'm actually quite interested in).
I had discussed wanting to pursue a more surrealistic approach to my work with Rebecca previously, but wanted some pointers in how to approach that, so she took a couple of these thumbs and combined them into this composition - talking me through her thought processes as she went (so lovely!)
I went with it - cleaning it up some and adding some more detailing - but this is so derivative of her example, and I wanted to practice some of the thought processes (without reinventing the wheel here)-
So I practiced with some other variations - keeping the same basic idea and composition, but with additional characters, and trying to push a bit further....
Also playing with color schemes, patterning vs. rendering vs. areas of flat color... Was really fun! Now to pick a trio of these and finish them up for reals.
Until SmArt School starts up again after the new year....
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